On Nov 17, 2022, the world lost Staughton Lynd at the age of 92. His life defies quick sysnopsis. A self-described Quaker-Marxist, he was a historian and peer of Howard Zinn, and with Zinn, taught at Spelman College and was once acting director is the SNCC Freedom School. Relocating to Yale with his wife Alice (who survives him), he was eventually blacklisted from academia due largely to his Vietnam War protest activities. He and Alice began studying and working in law, developing a practice of ‘accompaniment,” which loosely plays out as developing skills (like becoming a lawyer) useful to disenfranchised communities, and offering those services as activism and solidarity within your community. From labor organizing to Palestine, the Lynds placed themselves at the service of radical need.

The quote below is from his remarkable book with Andrew Grubec, “Wobblies & Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism, And Radical History” (2008, PM Press):

“On the one hand folks who consider themselves part the movement need the freedom to experiment, to experiment, to try out organizing ideas. I’m the Sixties I compared it to (a) traveling without a map, (b) planting seeds to see, in the words of the New Testament, which seeds grow and which do not. On the other hand we need methods and moments of drawing the experiences together.

I know something about traveling without a map. I have done it both on foot and by canoe, in each case with my son. It is. It is not so much traveling without a map. There is a map, at least there has been anywhere I have adventured. (One can compare Marxism to the map.) The question is, Where are we? I have climbed over a dangerous ridge because I somehow took the wrong fork at the juncture where the trail divided. I have recognized that we were mistakenly canoeing down an arm of water, exhausted but with the wind behind us, so that we had to turn around and paddle back against the wind.

The metaphor of sowing asks us not to be self-centered. If your organizing project prospers, while mine fails, it may have to do with the soil.”

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